Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Combining Childhood Vaccines at One Visit is Not Safe

There's an interesting article by a medical research journalist was published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons Volume 21 Number 2 Summer 2016.
Here are some snippets from various sections of the article. If you would like to read the entire article, a link is provided at the end of this post.

Background: In the 1980s vaccine manufacturers were frequently sued by the parents of children who were permanently disabled or died following vaccination. After paying out millions of dollars in these lawsuits, vaccine manufacturers were prepared to stop producing vaccines unless the federal government provided them with immunity from jury verdicts.
In response to pharmaceutical manufacturers’ threat to close their own vaccine factories, in 1986 Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA), protecting vaccine manufacturers from most financial liability associated with their products. Under NCVIA, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) was created to provide cost-effective arbitration for vaccine injury claims. Vaccine manufacturers can no longer be sued in a state or federal court for damages arising from a vaccine-related injury or death unless a petition for compensation under the new program is filed and denied.
Compensation under the program is paid for by a 75-cent excise tax on every vaccine purchased. (MMR contains three vaccines, so the tax is $2.25.) The money goes into a Trust Fund managed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. As of Mar 1, 2016, more than $3.2 billion had already been paid out, most of it to compensate parents whose children were severely disabled or died after receiving vaccines.1 Today, vaccine manufacturers not only make millions of dollars annually from their lucrative business, but they have been disincentivized from producing safer vaccines, since they are shielded from liability when their mandatory products harm consumers.
The Safety of Simultaneous Vaccines: Although CDC recommends polio, hepatitis B, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, rotavirus, Haemophilus influenzae type B,and pneumococcal vaccines for two-, four-, and six-month-old infants, this combination of eight vaccines administered during a single physician visit was never tested for safety in clinical trials.
Vaccine Doses and Mortality: Our study also calculated the case fatality ratio (mortality rate) among vaccinated infants, stratified by the number of vaccine doses they received. Of the 38,801 VAERS reports that we analyzed, 11,927 infants received one, two, three, or four vaccine doses prior to having an adverse event, and 423 of those infants died: a mortality rate of 3.6%. The remaining 26,874 infants received five, six, seven, or eight vaccine doses prior to the adverse event and 1,458 of them died: 5.4%. The mortality rate for infants who received five to eight vaccine doses (5.4%) is significantly higher than the mortality rate for infants who received one to four vaccine doses (3.6%), with a rate ratio (RR) of 1.5 (95% CI, 1.4-1.7). Of infants reported to VAERS, those who had received more vaccines had a statistically significant 50% higher mortality rate compared with those who had received fewer.

The Age Effect on Hospitalizations and Death: In the 38,801 VAERS reports we analyzed, 26,408 infants were younger than six months. After receiving one or more vaccine doses, 1,623 of those infants died: a mortality rate of 6.1%.